Morning Thread (5-8-2015)

Friday!

Happy Mother's Day weekend to all the mothers.

[Added: rdbrewer]

Commenter "Zombie" had a decent rundown of the the UK elections early in the morning.

Wow, been looking at the UK election results.

It really is a complete bloodbath for the Liberal Democrats (the ultra-far-left party) and Labour (the medium-far-left party). The Lib Dems went from being the #3 kingmaker party even seeking ways to displace Labour to be the leading left-wing party...to (after tonight's results) becoming a completely irrelevant fringe party. Their incumbents lost 41 races out of 47, leaving them with only 6 members of parliament. Probably the worst night any political party has had in any democratic nation in the last 40 years. Labour, simultaneously, has lost 28 incumbent seats, and went from being the dominant party in Scotland to having just a single member of parliament there out of 57 possible races. Complete apocalyptic collapse.

Meanwhile, the parties that picked up all those votes were the Scottish National Party, which now has 55 out of 57 seats in Scotland -- and UKIP, which has now easily displaced the Lib Dems to become the #3 vote-getting party in the country.

That's all the good news.

The bad news is that UKIP's votes are spread out evenly in districts throughout the land, so they are only going to win a tiny handful of seats, despite getting about 13% of the nationwide vote. They simply haven't yet risen to a majority in any district except for a few.

The other bad news is that although the "Conservatives" will retain power, and the two major leftist parties got thrashed, overall when you add up all the leftist parties combined (including the Scottish National Party, which has a socialist bent, and the Greens), they still won 49.6% of the vote. It's just that they split it up among various parties, and couldn't get unified.

So it's not like Britain has swung rightward -- it's just that the left parties are so incompetent and have such terrible candidates that they couldn't get their act together to win an election that could have been theirs.

But hey, I'll take "good news, bad news" over "it's all bad news" any day.

Thanks, Zombie.

posted by Andy at 05:55 AM

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